French language Q&A Forum

Which is correct je ne veux pas or que ne je voulais pas

Hi Ted I want to say I have a sore throat in French 

HI I'm in grade 10 learning french, We have a test on Metaphor and Irony and you need to identify whether Irony was used or metaphor was used. My question is as my first langues is English's how can identify whether metaphor was used or irony was used in french!!!!!(Like key words or how the sentence flows)

  I’m wondering what pesant is grammatically in the sentence "Ces informations valent leur pesant d'or !" - a gerund? Or is pesant d’or a fixed expression?

In this exercise, which asked to conjugate verbs in Plus-que-parfait, I wrote the following sentence: Marc lui avait souri et Gilles avait deviné tout de suite que Marc avait capturé son âme!  My « avait capturé » was marked down and corrected to be « avaient capturé ».  I cannot understand why a 3rd person plural conjugation is being used here instead of singular since the sentence talks about one person, Marc, who caught/captured Gilles’s soul.

Whilst not specific to this lesson - there are lot of references in these lessons to language choices that are "more elegant" than another.  Is this just another way of saying "more formal", or do the French have a specific desire or appreciation for elegant language?  In English we would never describe our language choices as one way being more elegant than another.  I'm just curious!

Is it incorrect to use "Est-ce quoi la Sorbonne?". It was marked incorrect on a quiz.  Is that because I can't invert c'est in this case?

Why does pronom relatif eliminates a subject complement.

Eg:J'ai rencontré par hasard une amie;je ne l'avais pas vu depuis mon enfance.

I know that typically, retourner is used to mean "to go back" and rendre is used to mean "to give back." But on this page: https://www.lawlessfrench.com/grammar/auxiliary-verbs-2/ , which discusses using variable auxiliary verbs in the passé composé, it mentions that retourner can also be used transitively and in that case, it changes its meaning to "to give back." So in the passé composé, can retourner be used in the same way that rendre is?

For example, would both of these be correct?

1. J'ai rendu le livre à la bibliothèque.

2. J'ai retourné le livre à la bibliothèque.